Online filters to stop blocking educational sites

Columbus teachers and students using the Web at school have found their searches blocked at every click. There has been no YouTube, even when science teachers wanted to show a video about cells.

Jennifer Smith Richards, The Columbus Dispatch

Columbus teachers and students using the Web at school have found their searches blocked at every click.

There has been no YouTube, even when science teachers wanted to show a video about cells.

Anatomy diagrams for health-track classes at the career centers? Nope. Elementary-school teachers searching for photos of well-known art? Thwarted. Math teachers who wanted kids to compare prices among online retailers? Out of luck. They couldn’t access Walmart, Kmart and Amazon.com.

Even the American Cancer Society’s website was blocked.

“You know why? They do research for breast cancer,” said Rhonda Johnson, the president of the Columbus Education Association. The word breast on a website meant the site would be blocked. So was anything related to the words gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

But the Internet-filtering system that Columbus City Schools educators say has made their jobs harder is going to relax a bit. A committee of teachers and the union met with the district’s new technology czar just before school started to suggest new rules.

The new filters go into effect on Monday for teachers. Students will be able to surf and search under the new system beginning on Sept. 23. Obvious restrictions to questionable material — websites that peddle hate, gambling or porn — still will be blocked, and federal rules for protecting children online still will be followed.

“It’s a good thing for kids,” Johnson said.

It’s more sensible, said district spokeswoman Jacqueline Bryant.

“There was no access to Facebook, no access to Twitter. It would flag certain words and certain phrases,” Bryant said. “Everything was blocked.”

Only high-school students will have access to social-media sites and only for instructional purposes. Teachers will monitor it, Bryant said.

The union’s vice president, Phil Hayes, said he once tried to talk to his class about online safety and built his lesson around an article that had appeared in The Dispatch. But that story mentioned Facebook, so Hayes’ lesson was a no-go when he tried to pull the story up online.

There were ways around the filter, said Hayes, who taught government and social studies. Teachers could fill out a form asking for access to a particular website and then send it over to the district’s centralized data center. Then they’d unblock it.

The Internet filter changes are a relatively easy fix compared with the other technology issues that teachers say they struggle with. Internet access is slow in many buildings, and it often takes at least half an hour — sometimes hours, Johnson has said — for a teacher’s computer to boot up. A portion of the money raised if voters approve the November levy would be set aside to fix those problems.